An Affair to Remember: The Song of Lunch

In Niall MacCormick’s deliciously waspish adaptation of The Song of Lunch, a narrative poem by Christopher Reid, a nameless man (Alan Rickman) and woman (Emma Thompson) meet for lunch fifteen years after their breakup. Nostalgia, with a side of bitterness, is the dish served cold: he is a schlubbish failed poet and book editor; she, glamorous with the “waft of wealth,” has married a successful writer and lives in Paris. Memories, old affairs, regrets and paths not taken: The Song of Lunch shares its preoccupations with Colin Clark’s My Week With Marilyn, recently made into a film starring Michelle Williams, and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending which won the U.K.’s top literary prize, the Man Booker, this year.

On the way to lunch, with Rickman as our narrator as well as chief protagonist, we weave through London’s colorful streets clogged by “gaggles of tourists.” He recalls the restaurant, Z, as an “unreformed” Italian with red-checked tablecloths and we see the pair, blurrily, as a younger, happier couple. Now Zanzotti’s, forebodingly, has become a sterile haven of charmlessly inoffensive food.

Whether as Severus Snape in Harry Potter or a dead classical cellist in Truly, Madly, Deeply, Rickman has the kind of face perfectly suited to villainy, sinister authority, or here, sardonic withdrawal. He and Thompson, whose career has spanned everything from Merchant Ivory costume films to (like Rickman) the Potter franchise, have played opposite each other before, in Sense and Sensibility and most famously in Love Actually as a fractured married couple. They are an instinctive, dramatic double-act: Here, she is dry, quick, lacerating; he, laconic and bruised. He eulogizes her wristbone; she says, sharply, that it is the “wrist of a married woman.” She regards him tenderly, then piteously, as he drinks more, mired in a depressive reverie. In a fit of frustration years in the making, she denounces his poetry as “therapy,” calling him on his “infantile truculence.” Whatever love there was has gone the way of the red-checked tablecloths.